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Lookin’ to Get Out vs. Lookin’ to Get Out: Revisionist History Vol. 1

By Adam Lippe

David Fincher’s Alien 3 is the best example of a very flawed film that was improved in a longer version, while still retaining all of those very same flaws. The theatrical cut, running just under two hours, has very little character development. And, therefore, apart from Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley, doesn’t make you care about […]

The Hangover

By Adam Lippe

There’s a famous scene in Doug Liman’s Swingers that is the key to understanding the entire career of The Hangover director Todd Phillips. As Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn go on a midnight venture in Swingers, driving from Los Angeles to Las Vegas in an attempt to salve their wounds as failed actors and lotharios, […]

Owning Mahowney

By Adam Lippe

Rarely has a movie captured the feeling of doom better than this one. You know what it’s like, where you find yourself in a repetitive cycle, constantly doing things that you know to be bad for you, and you don’t even really take any pleasure in it, it’s just a compulsive act. You know that […]

Mystic River

By Adam Lippe

From the television ads, Mystic River looked like your typical middlebrow Oscar movie, on a generic B movie subject but told in hushed tones with A list actors, which apparently covers up the generica (see In the Bedroom). I had just seen Sleepers the week before, another star studded, contrived, overrated, awards conscious drama about […]

3,000 Miles to Graceland

By Adam Lippe

If you have not seen 3,000 Miles to Graceland, please do, or don’t, depending on your sensibility. I should note a few things about it. First, it is a heist film (oddly enough, it seems to rip off the terrible Reindeer Games), in which the heist occurs in the first twenty minutes, but the film […]

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Roadracers

By Adam Lippe

Whenever there’s a genre parody or ode to a specific era of films, such as Black Dynamite’s mocking of Blaxploitation films or Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, the second half of Grindhouse, the danger is that the film might fall into the trap of either being condescending without any particular insight, or so faithful that it becomes the very flawed thing it is emulating.

Black Dynamite has nothing new to say about Blaxploitation films, it just does a decent job of copying what an inept [...]

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Featured Quote (written by me)

On Cold Fish:

Though the 16 year old me described the 1994 weepie Angie, starring Geena Davis as a Brooklyn mother raising her new baby alone, as “maudlin and melodramatic,” Roger Ebert, during his TV review, referring to the multitude of soap-operaish problems piling up on the titular character, suggested that it was only in Hollywood where Angie would get a happy ending. “If they made this movie in France, Angie would have shot herself.”

Well Cold Fish was made in Japan, where Angie would have shot herself and that would have been the happy ending.